


Quo Vadimus

by 060210



Series: Quo Vadimus [1]
Category: Cthulhu Mythos - Fandom, Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, LOVECRAFT H. P. - Works
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-14
Updated: 2015-11-09
Packaged: 2018-04-20 16:40:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4794704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/060210/pseuds/060210
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>First chapter in a broader fic drawing from the Cthulhu Mythos.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Part I**

****

**“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”** _The Call of Cthulhu_.

 

*****

 

If you believe my uncle, which I hardly ever have, then Ithaqua was the first of the Great Old Ones to fall. 

 

The story first came to me in one of those half-inebriated, rambling, and incoherent fugues that emerged, as if foretold, on languid, interminable winter nights. He was the sort of person that my parents, in their condescending largesse, occasionally tolerated for extended stays in an effort to demonstrate, conspicuously, their fashionable compassion. Over the years, they collected a small menagerie of eccentrics and derelicts that they paraded through the spare room of our house in a disconcerting quadrille of the damned. In retrospect, it probably should have told me something about my parents that they always kept a cautionary tale close at hand, both as a reminder of their relative advantages, but more importantly, as an illustration of the ineluctable and uniformly disastrous consequences of disobedience.  I’m relatively certain that they would have gibbeted one of the more cantankerous vagrants if they had only believed that they could get away with it.  I’m not sure that they didn’t look into it.

                                                                                                                      

My youth was like that:  rife with clumsy object lessons intended to urge me away from some perceived brink while bolstering the threadbare illusion that my parents both cared for more than their small corner of the material world and regarded me with a then-fashionably permissive indifference.  The practical effect was something akin to living in a _Goofus and Gallant_ nightmare scripted by unreconstructed narcissists.  

 

Once, sometime before puberty had really set in, I got caught up with that first wave of Brit-goth.  Through a sprawling intelligence network of friends’ irresponsible older siblings and degenerate cousins I managed to track down second-hand and thoroughly eroded copies of Bauhaus and Joy Division.  My mother disapproved, but limited her outrage to muttered passive-aggression as long as I adhered to the unspoken convention of the adolescent ceasefire and kept my headphones firmly rooted in the stereo.  I think I probably broke the admittedly fragile truce when I started sneaking her makeup to do my eyes like Siouxsie Sioux and teasing my hair like a complete fucking asshole. 

 

Within a week or two, I came home to find that they had added another fixture to their ceaseless parade of horribles; this time, it was a gaunt dyspeptic who I imagined to be the abandoned and talentless lovechild of Lou Reed and one of the lesser Ramones. Conjecture has always been a perilous game with my parents, by my guess is that I was supposed to wise up and recognize the inexorable trajectory from queer androgyny to anonymous unprotected sex with men to unrepentant heroin use and, ultimately, death, but after they realized that he and I spent our languorous afternoons chain smoking and jerking off, I think they expected that I was probably a lost cause on that front.  You sort of had to admire the effort, though.

 

*****

 

So it was with my uncle.  He was my father’s older brother, I think.  My father had been consistently embarrassed by his rude, provincial upbringing from the moment he realized the profundity of his own poverty and had, over the course of long, frustrating decades, slowly, deliberately shed the last vestiges of the backwater child that he had been.  Years later, and hundreds of miles from the Ohio Valley, the only indication that my father had not sprung, a fully realized notion, from somewhere urbane and delicate, was reflected in his tense discomfort and poorly-concealed disgust at whatever it was my uncle found himself doing at the time.  It was as though my father feared that, at any moment, his brother’s uncouth humor and social ignorance might breach an unseen, but elaborate, system of intrapersonal levees and mire his carefully cultivated identity in Appalachian sewage.    

           

My uncle had spent the past six months in the shadow of the Arctic Cordillera somewhere in far northern Québec.  He arrived from the bus station late one evening, long after I had fallen asleep. I remember always being eager for his bawdy accounts of misadventures with women, liberally interspersed with sidelong glances and knowing winks.  I always appreciated these.  They were charitable, in the sense that they gave me the impression that, one day soon, I would have my own stories about three-day benders with a Montréalaise mistress to offer in return.  In fairness, at the time, he should have been non-so confident that I would ever be able to traffic so freely in such ribald fare. 

 

When I awoke the next morning, however, he was still, evidently, lost to some dark corner of the basement, unmoved by the pale dawn of morning that had begun to force its way through the entirely decorative curtains my mother had installed down there years ago, asking in an almost risible earnestness, “don’t you just _love_ the new window treatments?”  I sat alone at the kitchen table and chewed at a piece of dry toast impassively, estimating how late I could possibly leave and still slide into my seat before the second bell rang. 

  
*****

 

I returned to the unenviable sight of my uncle reclining across my parent’s awful mohair couch in his tattered underwear, haltingly strumming out some glam rock standard and smoking a precarious Parliament down to the filter. He looked significantly worse for the wear.  He and my father had always been Whippet-thin, but during his months in the Great White North, it seems that he had, paradoxically, both gained and lost weight. His torso and legs, never powerful to begin with, looked emaciated and frail draped across the high arm of the couch. I could see the outline of his firm tendons where they drew the skin taut at his joints, stretching it to near-translucence.  His sunken frame rendered his face yet more remarkable.  Beneath his unruly beard I could make out a swollen and ruddy face; it was as if he had died weeks ago and had begun to bloat. My voice caught in my throat and I remained silent, watching as the cherry wandered determinedly toward the filter of his cigarette. 

 

A beat later, he said my name.  He didn’t call it, as if he cared whether I answered, or intone it as my mother did when she was experimenting with a new trend in parenting.  He just stated it, as if it had only just occurred to him that he wanted to hear it pronounced aloud.  I started to apologize, but he chuckled, sat upright, crushed what remained of the butt into an already-overburdened ashtray, and made room for me on the couch. I moved gingerly to sit next to him and caught the smell of stale tobacco and alcohol on his breath. It’s strange to admit, but this smell has always held a place of deep affection in my heart. It must have resonated somewhere deep in my olfactory sense, where memories of hot breath on my lips in late summer twilights still conjure up the stolen moments of heady and misbegotten high-school romances. 

 

*****

 

He had come from some camp somewhere near the Davis Inlet, almost directly across the Hudson Strait from Baffin Island.  His friend, Adrien, an irascible Acadian with murine features, had convinced my uncle to spend a few months with him at a camp in the far northern reaches of the province.  I guess he didn’t call it a camp, exactly; it was one of those bullshit, self-indulgent hippie colonies that styled itself a _retreat_ or a _collective_ or one of those aggrandizing appellations that, upon any significant reflection, means nothing at all.

 

In any event, Adrien assured my uncle that, given my uncle’s unofficial and likely unwelcome status in their dominion, both of them would be paid under the table for what promised to be relatively easy work.  Between long draughts of a thin lager, Adrien waxed rhapsodic about the virtues of cold sea air and the stories they would invariably collect as raconteur handymen at the edge of the world, surrounded by a bunch of whiny pseudo-spiritual misfits. What was more, Adrien continued, the clientele were undoubtedly bored suburbanites who had been convinced by some crackpot that an inordinate amount of peyote and free love would somehow make their lives less desperately boring and pathetic. To reprobates like Adrien and my uncle, this screamed of opportunity; if these fools had been taken in by a huckster once, then it could not possibly, they believed, be that difficult to unburden the rubes of their money.  To Adrien, life’s every turn revealed an opportunity for swashbuckling adventure as part of some piratical endeavor or other, most of which found prey in the world’s more gullible and credulous corners.  My uncle set down his glass and nodded slowly.

 

*****

 

They arrived in mid-September, about a week before the autumnal equinox and the start of the Program, as they were instructed to call it.  They slept in a small cabin, half dug into a berm on the perimeter of a large, impeccably manicured clearing.  Their boss, if such a term really applies in these circumstances, was a wiry native who had helped the Guide build the retreat over the course of the past few years.  The Guide, it was explained to them, had spent most of his adult life in convention centers and hotel conference rooms ministering to a far-flung and mostly disinterested flock.  His message had started somewhere adjacent to post-Vatican II liberation theology, but, in the past few years, he had begun to declare that he had seen, in his dreams, the revealed order of the universe. 

 

He warned that human spiritual intervention was needed to repair the cosmic balance and avert certain catastrophe.  Their boss clearly thought this was insane white people bullshit; my uncle and Adrien were inclined to agree.  Even so, the Guide’s renovated message resonated with psychedelically-inclined neo-pagans and otherwise disaffected spiritualists.  He explained that he felt the earth’s deep, permeating illness and that this universal malaise was the cause of alienation among her people, who, by all rights, were heirs to the same consciousness.  Practiced community, he asserted, was the only way to begin to right things.  There were great evils, he promised in stolen whispers, but they could be defeated together.

 

The balance of the Guide’s thinking remained obscure.  He styled himself, as most deluded and self-anointed messiahs do, an intermediary between his flock and whatever lies Beyond. The faithful were there to give him strength in what, ultimately, would be his private journey to set the world in its cosmic place.

 

*****

 

Adrien and my uncle could hardly contain their laughter as the congregants arrived. The sun sat low in the September sky as each bewildered carload picked its way up the fresh gravel path toward the rough pieces of stone that the Guide had laid across a narrow brook as a footbridge.  The cars stopped where the barely-worn track disappeared into the deep carpet of arctic moss. As the occupants cautiously disembarked, it became apparent that most were older than fifty, paunchy and loose with age, and seemed to have difficulty carrying themselves up the shallow grade toward the few modest buildings that had been thrown up against the elements.

 

A few, however, were decidedly young and conspicuously handsome. They bound together, laughing slightly as they overtook their older co-religionaries in their jaunt across the uneven exposed stone that cascaded from the ridge down to the turbid waters of the strait.  One on them, a broad, muscular man with a canvas bag slung across his shoulder, turned his gaze up the hill toward where my uncle and Adrien sat smoking.  Through the man’s thick beard and long matted hair, my uncle caught the glint of his bright, penetrating eyes and a quick twitch worked its way delicately up his spine.  Adrien, ordinarily garrulous and sufficiently self-satisfied to modulate between genuine conversation and thinly-veiled monologue as suited his fancy, paused. My uncle tossed his head briefly and groped for purchase on his memory, struggling to recollect what he had meant to say. Adrien threw him a metaphorical rope. The Acadian rose, crushing his cigarette into damp moss and cocked his head to indicate that they should make themselves useful.    

 

They helped to move everyone into the Spartan quarters that ringed the central clearing. Each bunk was intentionally and rigidly ascetic, as if the entire open room were a single, shared cell in a Franciscan monastery.  Even so, the new arrivals did not appear to notice the rough, army-surplus blankets or the bare, unfinished wood floors, and, instead, began to introduce themselves in hushed church whispers, as if they might risk disturbing the entire undertaking if they spoke in their crass and ordinary human tones. 

 

It takes a certain self-importance to believe that you are not only involved in a project of trans-dimensional importance, but, also, that the force of your voice alone can upset the otherwise-persistent machinery of cosmic alignment. My uncle should not have been particularly surprised; these were people who had flocked to an inhospitable spit of land jutting into the churning Canadian sea for the sole purpose of contributing their psychic energy to _some guy’s_ interstellar pilgrimage. Perspective, it seemed, was not their collective forte. 

 

After all fifty-or-so Novitiates (as they self-righteously insisted on being called) had arrived, the Guide, evidently waiting for this moment, emerged from among the group and strode resolutely toward the center of the clearing enclosed by the semi-circle of log buildings.  It was eerie, my uncle recalled; the group parted breathlessly and stood in hushed admiration as the gaunt, sinewy man turned to face them. He wore same linen shirt and canvas pants as the awed assemblage, in the latter-day adaptation of the same default uniform that had been adopted by every clique of self-abnegating sociopaths since about the time that St. Benedict decided that God would prefer it if the holy didn’t wear belts.  Or something. When the shared tension had grown almost audible, the Guide rhythmically tapped the tips of his delicate fingers together and slowly drew in his breath, the muscles in his jaw rippling under his weathered skin.  “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Ithaqua N’dOb’r wu’drza.”  He intoned. 

 

“Ithaqua N’dOb’r wu’drza,” they replied in uncanny unison. 

 

Adrien sputtered a reflexive laugh at what was plainly fucking nonsense.

 

*****

 

My mother returned home.  Upon being reminded, yet again, that her Yves Saint Laurent looked better on my lashes than it did on hers, she interrupted us with a silently-raised eyebrow and sternly-cast shadow.  My eyes met hers, impassively probing for the depth of her frustration.  Even back then, however, I was sufficiently adept at the art of teenage Satyagraha to realize that my victory would come later. Besides, I confided to myself, she was clearly just jealous. 

 

I rose wordlessly and glided in exaggerated and entirely-imagined elegance up the split-level stairs to my room.  Immediately, I could hear muffled argument from below, and smiled smugly at having avoided it.

 

*****

 

Dinner was awkward.  My mother and uncle tried, valiantly, to diffuse the palpable anxiety with saccharine post-argument blather about the weather, or the food, or whatever it was that they thought would deflect away from their earlier hostilities.  My father drained nearly an entire bottle of wine and wondered aloud if anyone wanted any more.  No one did. No one seemed to notice that, despite the apparent praise he had heaped on my mother’s mastery of the domestic arts, my uncle had hardly eaten any of his meal.  His hand trembled and the thin tines of his fork clattered gently against the broad ceramic plate as he shifted the vegetables and starch into less obtrusive piles.  I think my parents probably assumed that he was detoxing and so deserved the wrath of whatever vengeful demons had been loosed upon his already-overtaxed nervous system.  

 

I excused myself and descended the stairs to the living room couch where I slowly turned over the afternoon in my mind.  

 

Those fucking words “Ithaqua… N’dOb’r ... _whatever_ ” hadn’t stopped reverberating through my memory since my mother had walked downstairs nearly three hours ago.   I couldn’t place it at first, but as I replayed the scene in my mind over and over again, the gravel baritone in which my uncle had carefully, almost lovingly, repeated the words shook against the image of his sunken, sleepless eyes.  

 

I remembered.

 

The sound of padded footfalls broke my concentration and I turned to see my uncle dazedly wander toward me.  He was wearing clothes now, but the familiar t-shirt hung on his frame as if he had been placed in it to maintain its shape.  He crumpled next to me.  I asked neutrally about the rest of his time in Québec.  He shrugged, methodically lighting the two Parliaments in his mouth and passing one to me, before tearing half of the filter off of his and delicately sliding the modified cigarette between his cracked lips.  “Fucking hippies,” he muttered, as if that were a response. Our eyes met briefly as my mouth crept into an incredulous smirk.  He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands as he continued.

 

*****

 

It was November. As far as Adrien and my uncle could tell, the retreat had been roughly what they anticipated:  a good deal of chanting, silent contemplation, and spiritual exercises. The congregants lived according to some unstated routine, circulating through the retreat with choreographed precision that felt at odds with their whimsical views about the universe. Adrien tended to roll his eyes at the ritual of it, occasionally chiding the Novitiates about their “vision quests” and “séances.” The Novitiates either ignored him as an unenlightened non-believer or smiled amicably, apparently recognizing how unintelligible it all must have been to the uninitiated. No one invited Adrien to join.   

 

My uncle, however, became increasingly unsettled.  As weeks passed and night clawed farther into day, he sensed an increased urgency in the congregants’ behavior.  He slept poorly those nights, waking from nightmares to the sound of his own ravenous, desperate screams.  Adrien, ever-willing to play consiglieri, prescribed him a course of benzos.  Predictably, the dreams were unchanged and, what was worse, my uncle awoke, gurgling and inconsolable, pawing at the darkness.

 

By the time the time the sun heaved itself onto its demure winter throne and prepared itself to play jester in the moon’s coronation, my uncle had lost nearly twenty pounds.  He drank religiously during those days of stretching twilight and alcohol traced its path through the fine web of capillaries on his nose and cheeks, leaving behind a bloom of gin blossoms to mark its path for future returns. 

 

The blue-grey light of the far north winter was heavy now with an unspoken tension. The Novitiates (that word was rendered yet more absurd with each passing day) had grown frenetic in their efforts as the solstice drew near.  It remained unclear to Adrien and my uncle what precisely was going on. Over the past few days, a platform had risen hastily slightly outside of the clearing, immediately in front of the cascade of glacial stones that tumbled from the escarpment to the sea.   

 

*****

 

My uncle awoke in the pale, perpetual twilight, still half-drunk and covered in soot. He blinked as his eyes adjusted and he looked through the thin pane of glass to see that it had begun to snow again. He reached for a cigarette and stepped out in search of a cup of coffee.  He paused at the threshold, shielding his lighter from the wind and nursing the flame to life. 

 

Snow fell on his thick woolen coat.  Not snow. Ash.  He lifted his gaze toward the ridge and watched the delicate flakes drift upward in the breeze, suspended and virtually weightless in the dense December air.  He called to Adrien and moments later they stood atop a thin patina of ash in an otherwise empty clearing. They paced slowly around the well-trod arc in the earth, but found nothing out of place, not a matchstick timber or even a charred nail that would confirm what had once stood here. The nearby scrub had been scorched, but not burned, and nothing else appeared out of its ordered place.

 

Adrien cursed. He turned, grabbed my uncle by the lapel, and half-dragged him back to the cabin where he immediately began to throw his modest possessions into the battered trunk at the foot of his bed. My uncle began to protest, but was silenced when Adrien shoved a large duffel bag into his chest. Adrien, half-wild, stared at him through narrowed eyes and warned that, inevitably, people would ask questions about the retreat and that he had no intention of being within earshot when they did. 

 

Within minutes they had stripped the cabin clean.  My uncle threw his bag into the bed of the old pickup that they had driven north and saw Adrien turn back suddenly toward the berm.  He watched as Adrien doused the bare mattresses with kerosene before shuffling out the door, the inverted can streaming viscous fluid behind him in irregular spurts.  He hesitated briefly before crouching and letting the flame from his lighter dance through the volatile vapor onto the narrow rivulet now dripping from the doorway. He jumped back and jogged past my uncle, eyes absent and downcast.

 

After the sea had faded from view, my uncle broke the silence with the obvious question. Adrien didn’t respond immediately. He pursed his thin Québécois lips and my uncle watched as pressure drained them of blood. His lips separated, he swallowed, and his tongue darted outward momentary, as if he were preparing to speak. He exhaled slowly and raked his long nails through his greasy hair.  “What were we talking about?” he asked, as he pulled into a roadside motel.

 

*****

                                                                                                             

Night had claimed them, finally conquering those few persistent sparks of winter day that had remained in the air too long only to realize that the cold would not abate.  It was subtle at first, creeping outward uncertainly from nothingness, extinguishing the last memory of that ambient glow and smothering it with an almost tactile void, blocking first the retreating sun and then bed of stars.  Yet, it was strangely warm; they quickly discarded their heavy coats as the air grew thick beneath the growing empty.  

 

The chant, “Ithaqua N’dOb’r wu’drza” resonated through the cracked stones beneath their feet.  Tongues of flame flicked upward toward the thick canopy of nothing before curving dejectedly back to earth. The vicious winter cold retreated before the unfurling empty; as it passed over my uncle he felt that same twitch flirt with his tailbone and he felt unjustifiably calm.

 

My uncle turned to his left and saw a conflagration reflected in Adrien’s eyes. The platform had grown considerably in the past few hours and was now festooned with intricate garlands of human hair, animal bones, and carefully-braided leather cord; they ringed the rough wooden box like the macabre bunting of the damned.  The raw pine had been scrubbed clean.  The Guide ascended from the rear of the platform, his palms facing upward.  His voice echoed the familiar phrase, “Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Ithaqua N’dOb’r wu’drza.”  The crowd froze.  He drew a powerful breath and let loose a dolorous wail an octave higher than before, “Ithaqua vngaì thłn!”

 

The muscular man was suddenly at the Guide’s right hand.  He was clean-shaven now.   The Guide turned to face him and clasped his face between long, narrow fingers.  The crowd resumed, its frantic chant reverberating again through the stones.

 

My uncle and Adrien crept forward slowly, drawn into the rhythmic pulse of humanity laid out below.  As their eyes reached over the crest of the berm, the wretched work of the past weeks became manifest.  The Novitiates encircled the platform, topless and savage.  All bore large scars and burns written in coarse, thin strokes across the fleshy expanses of their torsos.  The satin tissue caught the warm glow and whispered of untold hours with a straight razor and a gas lamp. 

 

The Guide drew the muscular man toward him slightly. The man knelt and the Guide slid a long, slender knife from his sleeve.  He pressed the edge against the man’s neck, digging slightly into the skin. With one deft stroke, he dragged the blade downward from the man’s collar, the knotted buttons of the loose shirt easily popping away in series.  The man rose, bleeding slightly. 

 

My uncle looked downward.  Pairs of congregants carried enormous drums toward the center of the clearing. Each had been hollowed from the outer rings of some ancient oak, evidently hauled here from miles away. Across one end, the Novitiates had drawn taut a ragged circle of translucent skin.  As they set the drum shells down on their side, co-religionaries produced long mallets fashioned from fire-bleached bone and hammered out a surging rhythm that punctuated the chant. 

 

Blood continued to drip slowly from the man, splashing slightly as it hit the small puddle that had formed between his bare feet. His tan skin glowed bronze in the deep amber light of the humming blaze.  The Guide pulled the man into him, curling his long, slender fingers around the back of the man’s freshly-shaved head and kissing him deeply. The Guide pulled away slowly, pressing his palm delicately into the man’s chest and extending his arm fluidly. Small patches of rust remained where the punctures had wept onto the coarse woven cloth of the Guide’s shirt. The Guide smiled, drew the shirt over his head and crumpled it into a tight ball.  He tossed it toward the fire; it unraveled in flight and landed in a heap at the edge of the flames. 

 

“Ithaqua vngaì thłn?” the Guide inflected, as if asking a question.  The man tilted his head upward, almost imperceptibly. The Guide flicked two fingers on his right hand.  Almost immediately, four Novitiates hoisted a large wooden box to the center of the platform. Burned into the center of the oaken cube was a symbol that neither my uncle nor Adrien recognized. It depicted a complex fractal, repeating down to infinitesimally small iterations.  At the center of each of the crate’s other faces sat a thick iron ring, perhaps six inches in diameter.     

 

The muscular man, naked and still bleeding, stepped forward dutifully.  An attendant grabbed each of the man’s arms and swiftly yanked his wrists to opposite rings, bending the muscular man at the waist.  The remaining two Novitiates on the platform wrapped thick leather cords around his forearms, cinched them through the metal loops, and expertly tied them off.  The man pushed his thick palm against the tight leather strap and gripped with a silent desperation.

 

The Guide fit a wooden bit between the man’s teeth.  It splintered almost immediately as the Guide forced himself into the man from behind, small, sharp fragments of wood cutting into his lips and gums, releasing the soothing, familiar taste of his own blood. The man’s mouth lost its grip shortly thereafter.  His jaws, now unimpeded, slammed shut, catching his lower lip.  He pulled, straining the leather cords against the iron rings with each successive thrust, trying to hold himself in place.  Between impacts, he opened his mouth wide enough to free his lip. A moment later, pain and violence forced his teeth to clench reflexively and he heard a pronounced crack in his skull as one of his weathered molars gave way under the strain. He swallowed instinctively and felt the shard of enamel work its way down.  He fell unconscious.

 

As soon as the muscular man went limp, the crowd silenced and drew close.  The four elected Novitiates on the platform cut his bonds and turned him on to his back, each grabbing one of his limp appendages.  His eyes flicked open slightly and he craned his neck to see the Guide over him with that long, delicate knife.  The congregation howled with delight as the Guide positioned the tip of the blade immediately below the man’s sternum.

 

“Ithaqua vngaì thłn!” and he drove the grey steel deep into the man’s torso.  The man choked, issuing a guttural plea.  The Guide drew the knife toward himself, down along the man’s abdomen. He carved lovingly through the half-erect cock and threw it into the center of the incandescently brilliant fire.

 

A deafening crack tore through the audience, throwing the assembly cruelly to the dirt.  Several of them bent double and began to heave, gasping for air between convulsions. Others vomited silently, weeping into the frozen earth.  The column of flame surged upward, filling the sky, and burned a pale blue as the nothing stretched down to greet it. 

 

The sky burst.  The empty that had unfolded from within itself tore and continued to split along some invisible seam. The Guide stared at the fissure, arms outstretched.   Two enormous hands, each nearly as a large as man, slid through the veil. Long, improbable legs followed and then, that awful body.  It bent against the ceiling of nothing, stooped slightly as if braced against an immovable force.

 

Its eyes glowed red and it summoned a shriek of untold fury.  It grabbed the muscular man’s limp corpse and hurled it aside.  The body tumbled over large rocks, entrails spilling from the gash with each limp somersault. 

 

The creature bellowed again, in a voice so immense, terrible, and low that it was felt more than heard. Unmitigated dread washed over the camp and they lost consciousness.

 

*****

 

Adrien shook my uncle awake.  He blinked his eyes heavily, casting around the motel room for something familiar. He fixed on a small square frame hung above the television antenna.  It bore, without a hint of kitsch, the same faux-impressionist daffodil he had seen next to the vending machine in the lobby the evening before.  He felt that he should laugh, or at least chuckle, at the situation, but he felt removed from himself, as if he were watching the world through his eyes without the immediacy that agency demands. 

 

Adrien shook him again, more forcefully this time.  His vision blurred and refocused on Adrien's wind-burned face. He coughed, wincing slightly as pain rippled outward from his lungs.  He almost choked and cleared his throat.  The ends of Adrien’s lips curled up fractionally. “Some night,” he said, his voice somewhere between a declaration and a question.  It was unusual for Adrien to be so obviously uncertain. My uncle began to respond, but realized there was nothing to say.  He searched for something, anything, to insert about what had surely been a debauched and ribald evening worthy of their collective capacity for depravity, but found nothing.   He panicked slightly, flipping through imaginary tiles of recent memories for whatever it was that Adrien had meant. 

 

Adrien read the anxiety written in knit brows on my uncle’s face.  His eyes softened slightly in sympathy.  “Me either.  Fucking benzos.”  

 

*****

 

By this point, my uncle had rocked so far forward that the tip of his cigarette nearly rested in the ashtray.  “Fucking benzos.”   


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beta version of the second chapter of Quo Vadimus.

**Part II**

 

It had been nearly three years since my parents had last extricated my uncle from that modest room tucked into the far corner of our basement. Their profound vanity and pompous magnanimity refused to permit them to request directly that my uncle leave. Rather, the protocol of their superficial benevolence required a series of elaborate and oblique orchestrated maneuvers directed at inducing him to drift away listlessly during the night and thereby obviate the possibility of an unseemly interaction during which they might be forced by appearances to offer that my uncle could stay yet awhile longer, if he so desired. Hence, when they became sufficiently uncomfortable with the amount of time that he and I spent together, talking over and around his disquieting dreams, they began, in an effort at cordial subtlety, to suggest that he might find some other accommodation more conducive to his lifestyle.

 

I was never entirely sure what social life my parents imagined that my uncle was able to maintain during those bleak weeks, but intuition suggests that it was a polite way for them to say that neither of them especially appreciated finding crusty cumsocks pasted to the couch. I didn’t particularly mind wading through his indiscreet trail of ejaculate; having a hapless and obvious scapegoat gave a brief reprieve to my otherwise unfailingly diligent masturbatory counter-intelligence service. My juvenile unwillingness to compromise the external manifestations of my deviance had understandably engendered a disgusted and reproachful vigilance from my parents, particularly my mother, so I early developed a self-abuse protocol that would have make the Mossad look reckless. My uncle, by contrast, was a slovenly, shameless maelstrom of ungoverned id in whose raucous, filthy wake I easily concealed myself, until they forced his ass out. C’est la guerre, I suppose.

 

*****

 

He didn’t sleep much at all those first few nights at our house. On his third or fourth morning in the basement, I slouched down the stairs to offer him a cup of coffee. The door was slightly ajar, a bright wedge of sunlight slicing across the carpeted floor, undulating in the rippled pattern written by the tightly knotted cloth. With my cheek resting against the hollow wood, I listened intently for some indication of movement on the other side. Hearing the unmistakable song of weight shifting on old, well-worn springs, I tapped the door with the ball of my left foot, cringing instinctively as the hinges groaned with the self-satisfied torpor born of generations of thick paint. He didn’t react when I crossed the threshold; he just sat there, half-upright, back nestled into the corner, rolling his right index finger absently against his temple as his gaze tunneled a hole in the floor beside the table.

 

I cleared my throat abruptly. He raised his eyes to meet mine. He looked hollow. “Coffee?” I managed, hoarsely, through a clenched throat. Comprehension returned gradually to his face, weaving itself together in the crow’s feet around his eyes and tugging them gently open; his eyebrows migrated toward his hairline and his head bobbed on his neck independently of his torso. He slid off the comforter; his body had lost whatever resistive force had previously held it together. His limp feet fell heavily to the floor in quick succession; his center of gravity appeared to remain behind him, yet his skeletal frame was quickly erect, as if he had been pulled forward and upward by some invisible thread, perceptible only through its effect on the material world. He was as a marionette whose puppeteer had permitted him to dangle too close to the floor and, as a result, had begun to splay wildly at the ankles, extremities no longer firm with gravity’s pull, only to be yanked upright by a reflexive overcorrection.

 

He stepped passed me mechanically and I followed a respectful step-and-a-half behind, watching his limbs shamble disconnectedly through space, like members of a family that have long since ceased speaking to one another, but who are forced by circumstance to live under the same desperate and crumbling roof. His gait was hypnotically without rhythm; the pronounced crest of his ilium carved out an erratic ellipsis as it precessed messily through space.

 

He poured from an impractical, almost comical, height, allowing his head to tilt gently to the side as agitated droplets leapt back against the diffuse force of the incoherent stream. Brown tears began to roll down the face of the wide mug and spread across the tile counter, inevitably finding one another, joining in glorious congress and leaving stained trails behind them as they marched resolutely across the imperfectly flat surface. The thick walls of the ceramic pig in which my mother had begun to store sugar muttered muffled clinks as my uncle carelessly lifted the lid away from the body and set it down roughly beside the percolator. He distractedly heaped successive spoonfuls into the warm, opaque oily liquid, sweetening it to the point of saccharine, cloying, undrinkablility. Undeterred, he dragged one of the chairs away from the table, leaving the decapitated porcine figurine to contemplate the rapidly-drying specks of coffee on the grout around it. I think it was the hog’s face that my mother appreciated; it was anthropomorphically smug and judgmental, as if to inquire, in frozen perpetuity, whether or not you really _needed_ sugar with your beverage, of if you really would be quite fine without it, in the end. Sometimes I caught her turning it away before surreptitiously sweetening her food; I think she might honestly have worried about disappointing that smirking porcelain smile and so worked assiduously to hide her shame from that damned thing, even though its _sole reason for existence_ was to dispense fucking sugar out of its halved corpse.

 

My uncle hovered rigidly on the edge of the thin aluminum kitchen chair. My mother called it Mid-century Modern, but I’m pretty sure that was just a grandiose and grossly inaccurate sobriquet for something that they had probably stealthily reclaimed from beside a dumpster when that diner near the highway had finally shuttered a few years ago. My parents were, as should be unmistakably clear by this point, determined and indefatigable social-climbers, but my father’s single income had not yet caught up with the couple’s limitless pretensions to the ranks of refined cognoscenti who had always sneeringly resented my parents’ nouveau-riche sensibilities and never tolerated their revealingly accommodating attitude toward reuse and thrift.

                                  

In their eternal aspiration, my parents had spent beyond their means to secure a desirable address and had devoted the years since to reconstructing the house in conformity with their perceived station in life. As might be expected, they started with the rooms that guests might plausibly have an opportunity to judge during a visit; so far, this left only the kitchen, the basement bedroom, and my room, untouched. Given that my now-apparent proclivities were the subject of murmured gossip in the relatively repressed bedroom community, it was generally a rather simple matter for my mother to persuade guests to skip that stop on the nickel tour with a furtive smirk and stage-whispered, “you know what he’s like.” Almost to a person, the domestic tourists nodded in grim commiseration, presumably grateful to have been spared the acute emotional trauma of stumbling unsuspectingly into whatever barely-concealed and aggressively-homoerotic degeneracy lay within.

*****

 

I think what really got to them, though, was when he started screaming in the night again. Perhaps two weeks after the morning on which I had found him, dissociative, but awake, on the bed, we were ripped harshly from sleep by a penetrating screech that slipped its talons beneath our eyelids and peeled them harshly back toward their orbits. The air was vacant immediately afterward, unnaturally still, as when someone has accidentally rung a heavy brass bell and clasps his hands around it in an effort to arrest its rude response.  

 

I reeled, groggy with sleep inertia and uncertain whether I’d actually heard anything at all. I reclined slightly, disposed to assume that I had been mistaken, but I heard my father’s heavy, semi-conscious footfalls in the corridor. My door creaked and I saw his disembodied head in the rectangle of dim ambient light cut by the doorframe. He looked at me, irritated and expectant. I shook my head briefly, shrugging instinctively. He nodded knowingly, half-rolling his eyes as he turned away, frustrated with himself at having not checked the obvious source first. I flopped out of bed to follow and narrowly avoided landing on my right shoulder. I recovered my balance and slid into the hallway behind my father, tapping the far wall with my fingertips as I went to confirm my distance and to prevent myself from listing too far in one direction. About halfway down the stairs we heard it again, muffled this time, but still, somehow infinite and unimpeded. It was vast, terrible, and distant; it echoed this time, hanging in the air like some cacophonous clarion sounded at the base of a cavernous valley. My father gripped the doorknob with his thick, calloused hand and torqued it swiftly.

 

My uncle’s eyes were dread. His forearm was locked between trembling jaws, his long, chipped fingernails cracking as they strained against the tough skin in the crease of his palm. Blood flowed freely down his wrist, thickly coating his index finger and spluttering onto the duvet where it began to seep resolutely into the worn fabric, where it crept outward irregularly along the thin threads of the loose weave, rusted tendrils grasping for virgin territory in the bleached cotton. Tears threatened to leap from his shimmering, panicked eyes. His head jerked upward and he looked past us so intently that we whipped around to follow his gaze. Where his eyes lay, there was nothing, just the dingy white paint that my parents had neglected to reapply in the years since we’d moved in.          

                                                                                                                           

After a few nights of ghoulish wailing, my parents resolved between themselves that, in the interest of fairness, they really ought to make the room available to some other wandering soul in need of a home, preferably one whose psychosis manifested less obtrusively and who didn’t douse the basement so liberally with his undoubtedly syphilitic blood.

 

*****

 

Over the next few years, I discovered that there were people in the world willing to have sex with me and I forgot nearly entirely about my uncle’s psychotic break. This owed partially to my parents’ polite amnesia about the inconvenient segments of their lives, but it was also just one of those things that faded from my memory as I spent progressively less time in my their increasingly bizarre tabernacle of desultory suburban egoism and more time out in the world searching for other feckless youths with whom to explore the more interesting aspects of my hormonally-disoriented adolescence.

 

It was on one of those tense, Indian Summer nights, shortly after school had started again, but before fall had really taken over in earnest that I met Dylan. We had fallen in with mutual friends by the elementary school playground equipment to pool whatever alcohol, pills, and weed that we had managed to pilfer during the week and see how things turned out. As it happened, after a attacking a half-pint of schnapps and chasing it closely with a fist full of mystery from the communal pile, Dylan really appreciated getting his cock sucked by a dude; I was obviously happy to oblige.

 

He was straight, mostly, but after I swallowed that evening we hung out periodically to listen to music, drink a little, and fuck. I didn’t have any illusions about a _relationship_ with him, but he had a decent dick and in the interim he served my need for male companionship well enough. Frankly, everything was _fine_ with Dylan until my mother came home early one afternoon and found me with my head between his legs and a couple of fingers in his ass. I had, of course, intended to avoid finding myself in such a predicament, but despite my best efforts, it remains difficult to hear much of anything when someone’s thighs are clamped firmly around your head in trans-orgasmic rigor. In any event, it serves her right for coming home early from book group; it is part of the parental code to give advanced notice of a premature return in order to furnish errant children with an opportunity to maintain appearances or scatter like roaches in the wake of heavy footfalls. Whatever. As should be obvious by this point, my mother did not react particularly well to this discovery and made her displeasure immediately known.

 

*****

 

Look, I know that they wanted to separate me from what they assumed to be the focus of my deviant sexual practices, but in terms of potential punishments for teenagers exhibiting contra-normative erotic behavior, indefinite banishment to Spain _durante el nacimiento de La Movida_ is about the most counterproductive thing you can conceivably orchestrate. It’s a lot like how those “pray the gay away” preachers always seem to send their hapless “patients” to the most homoerotic summer camps imaginable, replete with long, secluded walks in the woods, vigorous team sports followed by communal showers, and naked trust building exercises that inevitably demand an unnecessary degree of physical contact. That said, given that my parents had systematically intimated to virtually everyone in their extended social circles that I drank animal blood directly from still-beating hearts and wore a fresh goat head while sodomizing octogenarian priests, my uncle was, somewhat understandably, the only person that would take me in.

                                                                             

*****

 

I landed in _El Prat_ somewhere around dawn, jetlagged and bewildered. My greasy hair sat matted on the side of my face, sticky in the humid air and flattened from the several hours it had spent crushed against the window in attempted sleep. I had taken a year or two of _español_ with _Señora Eriksen_ , but when I emerged from the jetway, everything had fucking _cedillas_ and Xs everywhere; it looked like a Spaniard had stroked out while trying to speak French.

 

I followed the general flow of humanity through the security gates, under the vigilant eye of the _guardia civil_. Somehow I fumbled my way through immigration and customs, mostly intuiting the requisite responses from the cadence of the distracted questioning and whether any of the words sounded particularly ominous. Apparently mollified by my abysmal performance, the jowly man refracted in the plexiglass waived me on toward the last set of doors and the ambulatory din of the terminal beyond.

 

My uncle yanked me from the stream of disoriented travelers by my right shoulder, freeing me from the dense herd and depositing me by his side. He looked better; his flesh fit properly around his bones and he no longer resembled that illustration of an 18th Century scurvy patient that had always haunted my childhood, a haggard wraith lurking between the pages of one of my pop-up books, lifting its upper lip with a gnarled finger to reveal bloody gums and missing teeth. He grabbed my stained canvas duffel bag, hefting it briefly to test the force of gravity against its insubstantial straps. Pouting slightly between pressed lips, he tossed the entire irregular cloth cylinder over his shoulder, balancing it against his lean trapezius before leading me out into the buzzing Catalan sun.

 

*****

 

Predictably, he was holed up in a collapsing town house in the _barri gòtic_ with a few other refugees displaced by _la movida._ It is, by now, well-documented that after the dictatorship collapsed, Madrid, finally free after four decades of relentless Catholic oppression and perversely-prude censorship, entered its unsavory experimental phrase, drinking and fucking like an Amish teenager on _rumspringa_ who has taken up with Michael Alig, except that most of them didn’t end up quite so dead. As soon as it got out that _Madrid nunca duerme,_ every poseur, pretender, and cut-rate party monster descended on the city, desperate to be part of it. They engorged the capital, filling every vacant crevice and crowding out the previous generation of Bohemian transients who now chafed against the crass culture club vanguard. My uncle, never terribly preoccupied with where, or with whom, he slept, somehow managed to get carried by the proverbial undertow back toward Barcelona among snobbishly anti-fashionable and genuinely destitute.

 

Partially obscured from the morally-fetishistic Francoists both by distance and by generations of quasi-autonomy and aloof superiority, the Catalans had kept the eternal flame of Spanish libertinism smoldering for the middle years of the twentieth century, only to watch it burst back into a robust column of fire some hundreds of kilometers away in the center of _la mancha_. Those prepossessed denizens of the Mediterranean Republic of the Tasteful did not mind, of course. To their mind, the gauche, obvious efforts of the resurgent capital only emphasized the urbane, cosmopolitan refinement that had been meticulously cultivated in Barcelona as their coveted inheritance for generations.

 

My uncle left Madrid with his flatmates and installed himself in what had been the living room of a palatial town home that had belonged a feckless heir of one of those long-forgotten Aragonese counts who, presumably had wandered off somewhere during the civil war or succumbed to the cruel vicissitudes wrought by centuries of rapacious inbreeding. It still bore the device of one of those military-religious orders above the portal, now finally showing signs of decay in the years since anyone had bothered to pay it any attention. Viva Calatrava, I suppose.

 

Entropy had long since won its war against most of the building, hurling large stones from the façade and peeling back tired layers of paint and ill-considered wallpaper, but I didn’t mind; I tossed my backpack down on the firm, entirely-decorative couch where I imagined that I would sleep. My ears perked to the sound of heels ticking across the old hardwood.

 

I think I loved Sara immediately. She was a petite _Catalana_ , still a head shorter than I was, even in those erotically preposterous boots. She wore her hair in a messy bun, pulled loosely away from her narrow face, a fly-aways catching the sun and a few strands tumbling to frame the sharp angles of her jaw. As she leaned against the doorjamb her translucent sweater pulled tight across her small breasts, revealing their subtle curves and, I imagined, the faint border demarcated by the by slightly darker skin around her nipples. Her full lips pursed imperceptibly as she smiled at my uncle. I was awash in hormonal envy and I fucking hated him for grinning back.

 

She turned those hazel, almond eyes toward me, extended her toned arms for a perfunctory embrace, and glided forward slightly. I moved to meet her, savoring the brief contact and probably holding her chest to mine half a beat longer than was appropriate. She exaggeratedly, almost ironically, kissed the air next to each of my cheeks and the musky smell of dispersing perfume hung in the air for a moment. It caught in my brain and I don't think that I've ever forgotten it; I still smell it in dreams.

 

She arched her back away from my torso and clapped her palms on my shoulders politely, dismissing me in the way that a distant relative does after the customary, obligatory display of neutered affection is over. We exchanged insincere pleasantries. Her English was disconcertingly clear and fluid; she was garrulous and eloquent, flashing, even in those first few deft volleys of conversation, fleeting hints at the stunning velocity of her humiliating and towering intellect.

 

She looked out the window down to the narrow alley wedged between the ancient buildings.  

 

“ _Bueno, chicosss_ ,” she respired in a long, sibilant hiss. Apparently without finishing her thought, she gave a loose half-pirouette and was gone.

                                            

*****

 

The party had fallen from a firm, rolling boil to a meager simmer. Day had almost begun to push the darkness out from the hills surrounding the city and the morning star had nearly completed its shallow arc across the Balearic Sea. I sat crossed-legged on the floor in the living room while she reclined across from me, supine on the chaise lounge, a bottle of _priorat_ swinging pendulously between her thumb and index finger. She had swigged from it liberally throughout the evening, meandering peripatetically through the high-ceilinged rooms, stopping only to interject wry and sardonic humor into otherwise predictably cultured and utterly vacant conversations.  

 

My uncle had passed out across the room on the unadorned mattress that he had dragged up from the street a few months ago. Nearly everyone had left the house and Sara and I were the only two people conscious in the living room. A masculine laugh with a warm, romantic timbre emanated from somewhere below, traveling comfortably along the plaster of the thick interior walls. I watched my uncle roll onto his stomach and instinctively, unconsciously scratch himself. I remembered that night three years ago and wondered when he had stopped screaming in his sleep.

 

I felt something without feeling. Sara’s eyes rested on me indeterminately. She extended the punt of the wine bottle toward me, jostling it slightly so that I understood that I should take it from her. I eyed the stain that her deep crimson lipstick had left around the emerald glass neck. I had watched that streak of color all evening as it wriggled, curled, and rolled, ceaselessly redefining the border between her mouth and shallow cheeks. Occasionally, her charmingly European teeth, un-molested by orthodontics, would click together for an instant as she tossed her head back slightly, the better to enjoy the droll _denouement_ of whatever conveniently apropos vignette she had just concluded.

 

Her hands unburdened, she wiped them against one another limply, as if absolving herself of the wine’s lingering influence. She straightened herself, as if preparing to lambast me again for my sophomoric reading of Foucault or Derrida or whomever. I had tried to remind her earlier that I was, quite literally, a high school sophomore, but she had just chuckled irreverently and pinched my face.

 

Now, though, she rested her palms just above her knees, with her spindly fingers curved inward around her slender thighs. She leaned forward, her long neck extending out above her acutely angled elbows. I shifted, uneasy, but I craned my neck backward to keep her in focus. Even so, I could make out the practiced border of her liquid eyeliner as she blinked twice in imperceptibly rapid succession.

 

Just as quickly, she leaned back, taking the sedimentary remains of the wine with her. Finally, apparently tired of this overwrought preamble, she spoke. Her painstakingly-manicured left eyebrow climbed fractionally and she probed, inquisitively: “you and your uncle are close, eh?” I wobbled my head noncommittally, jealously guarding my reputation in the adolescent fantasy that I might be able to weasel myself into any form of sustained physical contact with Sara if I played things correctly. While I would later come to feel shame at the erratically calculated gamesmanship of my hormone-soaked teenage frontal lobe, at the time it was cruelly difficult to disaggregate my base sexual impulses from my humanity.

 

Her face slackened. “He said you saw him at his worst.” My body seized; my jaw set. “I guess,” I replied, doing my best to maintain my coveted neutrality, studying her expression for any suggestion as to what she knew and how I should respond. She countered my ambivalence, “but he told you what he saw?”

 

I reeled internally. “What he _saw_?” I wondered if I had understood her correctly or if her otherwise impeccable English had momentarily faltered. Sure, my uncle had definitely let himself go bit in Canada and had certainly gotten the worse of some truly fucking horrifying nightmares, but all of that rambling about _the empty_ and _Ithauqua_ _N’dOb’r wu’drza_ had just been stream-of-consciousness dreamscapes boiling up from deep wells of hallucinogens buried deep in his grey matter by immoderate overindulgence in psychadelics. He had never told me the same version twice and the man wasn’t precisely the paragon of psychological stability; it was just some incessant, recurrent nonsense that he insisted on bringing up whenever he split a joint with me.  

 

I restrained myself, controlling my tone and diction, careful to avoid conveying more than I intended and inadvertently tipping my hand. “He told me about dreams.”

 

“ _Bueno._ Dreams,” she repeated, knowingly, tapping a manicured nail against her incisors.

                                                                                                         

*****

 

It was near noon when I finally peeled myself, sweaty and exhausted, from the damp cling of the living room floor. Coughs rolled into hacks as I squeezed the forearm on which I’d slept in a vain effort to restore some feeling in it.  

 

My uncle wasn’t in his ersatz bed, so after I found the bathroom, I began to wander toward the sound of boiling water, my bare feet slapping against the exposed wood. I turned the corner onto a pair of vaulted French doors. Someone was making espresso on the stove. I heard the irregular mechanical whirr of a manual grinder and caught the volatile, buoyant presence of pulverized _torrefacto_ beans.

 

I opened my mouth to ask who was responsible for the _café_ , but caught my cheek between molars as I saw a naked man fall back into the chair next to the stove. His momentum carried part of the way through the high wooden back, and it sat precariously on its hind feet. For a long moment he hung there, the narrow legs groaning worryingly as the undersized nails began to pull from the body and the wood fibers of the narrow pegs crushed under the strain, permanently weakened and deformed. It looked as though he would fall back into the small window. He didn’t. In that moment, a pale hand darted forward and grabbed his dark, coarse hair. The muscles in the thin forearm tightened and the wrists jerked down and toward the unseen body. The man tumbled onto his knees, his head suspended by thick strands gripped between satin fingers, his neck straining desperately to reconcile itself this plainly untenable position.

 

Sara slid into view. She wore plain, startlingly conservative black briefs. Her breasts sat low on her torso and curled up slightly from below. Suddenly aware of my own breathing, I ducked behind one of the twin doors and peered through the gap on which the door hinged.

 

Gradually, she worked him back to the chair. Careful to distribute her weight evenly, she straddled him, looking down at his eager, expectant face without revealing anything. She kissed him on the neck clinically, acting passionlessly to achieve a desired response. I could hear the deep hum of pleasure from his throat, his left cheek groping blindly for soft, affectionate contact. I felt the ensuing slap even through the doorjamb. She had steadied his face intimately, lovingly in her left hand, resting her nails delicately along the bony portion of his orbit and then whipped her right hand from behind her shoulder, across her body, and firmly into his face.

 

He said nothing. Small wet patches of red formed across his olive skin. He took her hand in his, rubbing his thumb into her palm slowly. She looked down incredulously. His gaze followed hers and he closed his eyes, blissfully. The right hook landed, nearly perfectly transferring an unexpected reservoir of kinetic energy from her shoulder and arm, through her fist, to his jaw. Something crunched as she rebounded with an unrepentant elbow to his nose.

 

She smiled slightly, tracing her index finger over his firm chest. With cruel patience, she dragged those broad, swooping arcs lower over the course of several minutes. When the path fell to his waist, she stopped. I could hear his rasped breaths catching somewhere inside of him. She flattened out her right palm and pressed it down, trapping his cock and scrotum between the seat and her weight. He coughed involuntarily. She laughed a little and dropped her left hand on top of her right. Gracefully, maddeningly gracefully, she shifted her mass onto her arms. His eyes never opened, but I could tell that they had rolled back into his head, finding that sinister place where complete, inhuman desperation borders transcendent ecstasy.

 

She arched her back, returning her talons to his inner thighs. Clenching her legs, she drew his knees together and held herself in place with the static friction. Peering over her left shoulder, she hooked two fingers behind the Bakelite handle on the moka and hoisted it, steaming, off of the open flame of the stove. Thin, gasping clouds streamed from its spout, cascading back over her hand as they cooled. The once-lustrous chrome scattered noon-light chaotically over its surface and onto her fingers. She brought the pot down onto the bare skin on the top of his thigh without remorse. It balanced there for a terrible heartbeat, hissing and squealing with the horrified entreaties of seared skin. Bubbles began to form almost immediately as the tissue blistered toward the surface. With great pride, Sara stepped to the floor and leaned over, admiring what he had let her do. Her lips formed a tight ring and she blew coolly over the creeping edge of the burn as it expanded outward, conquering virgin skin with referred heat and drawing it into the ranks of the ruined. A brief sigh escaped his lips. She shook her head, disappointed, and rapped on the sticky skin with an ancient, smooth wooden spoon.

 

He remained silent, eyes open now and held unflinchingly straight. She braced the convex curve of the spoon against the delicate ridges of her fingerprints, rotating her grip steadily until the makeshift crank leapt free and struck the same place, rippling punishment through the cooked flesh.

 

His gaze wandered along the smooth plaster wall until it snagged on the sharp hook of my eyebrow. He grinned and pointed his jaw toward me, leaning against Sara and humming slightly until she searched for the source of the distraction. I couldn’t move. It felt like any number of dreams I’ve had, those dreams where despite persistent, urgent internal screams, my body refuses to comply. It was as though something in me had been left off the hook and my autonomic response to flee like a scolded child or, at the very least, to fucking blush at having my hand caught in the cookie jar, had simply gotten caught in the infinite loop of biological busy signals.

 

The tired stitches around my collar gave out; the familiar sound of fabric ripping along a seam was all I heard over my raucous pulse. I spilled across the floor, my right forearm absorbing the force of my collapse until my bare knees skidded along the tile and relieved some of the burden. My vision left and returned as blood sloshed around the far recesses of my brain and soon reached a new equilibrium. Before I had entirely righted myself, weight buckled me. I couldn’t stand. My chest was now pressed firmly to the floor. Over my shoulder, I watched Sara re-tie her bun.

 

She had taken me down with practiced precision and was now straddling me, her hips subtly resting on my lower back. The man didn’t shift from his seat, apparently well-trained, or at least sufficiently transfixed by the scene unfolding before him to contemplate disobedience. Her five impeccable nails traced furrows through my hair, catching periodically on hidden imperfections and imperceptibly knotted hair, until they were delivered into the vast expanse of my forehead. However, although they now stood unimpeded in their advance, her digits halted at the frontier. They bivouacked, looping coil after coil of straight hair into their position.

 

I don’t remember the wind-up, but there must have been one. Before I could brace against the impact, my nose folded against the ceramic, splattering blood across the black-and-white hexagons toward the man’s left foot. In the moment, I writhed to the left to determine if I had, in fact, sprayed his big toe. Her wrist crossed my throat, pressing up beneath my Adam’s apple, yet deftly avoiding both the carotid and the jugular. At least I would pass out before sustaining any noticeable brain damage. Her arm remained there as she studied the rapid thumping of blood through my body, periodically relaxing the tension across her muscles and permitting me a few moments in which to drag hurried, panicked breaths before she shoved my head forward again, plunging me back into mental twilight. My pupils labored to find focus, _searching for a former clarity_ in their hypoxic environment; none was to be found. My face continued to leak blood and the round, full taste of iron coated my tongue and I was gone.

 

I opened my eyes to his feet, stained red by my mouth. I suppose I had been slid those few feet, but I might have shuffled myself; it’s difficult to say. However it had happened,

 

“Sit up.” I did. Her tone did not admit of disagreement. My ass rested lightly on my feet. Crouching over me, she hooked an index finger in each of my cheeks, twisting them into a morbid smile. I contemplated biting down. I didn’t. I swallowed most of his cock easily as she thrust the heel of her palm into that exposed place where your spine meets skull. It was oddly comforting to have her there, rhythmically thumping my face forward to his groin. I kept my mouth open, rolling my tongue dutifully along the shaft as I went.

 

*****

I couldn’t tell if my uncle was looking at me through his sunglasses. He hadn’t made eye contact earlier. I get that having your quasi-girlfriend use your nephew to suck vicarious cock can be awkward, but if I managed to be alright with the situation, he sure as shit should have toughed it out.

 

He took a timid bite of the _pa amb tomàquet_  that littered the old, splintering wooden board between us. A loose chunk of tomato, incompletely cleaved by his uneven teeth careened off his chin and onto the stone of the quiet side street. The dark stain of olive oil spread out slightly across the porous stone before I settled on what to say.

 

“Sara asked me about those dreams.” I imagined that circumspection was probably the safest tact, given the circumstances.

 

“Mmm?” Toast cracked through his hum.

 

Pressing the initiative seemed a poor idea. I squinted in the sun, working against a hangover that had begun to seize my temples and pull them toward one another from the inside, like a toxic Samson with no regard for its continued survival. I sipped the crisp, bright lager slowly, hoping to counter the worst of the malaise and waiting for my uncle to offer something more than feigned ignorance and prevarication.

 

*****

 

“Ithaqua isn't so bad, as far as it goes.”  Sara had fallen backward, perpendicular across the high, winged arm of the chair in the far corner; her legs squeaked across the cracked oxblood leather as her skin caught and released.  I hadn’t heard her approach; the dramatic, sweeping back of my seat swallowed the sounds of the outside world and left me alone in an anechoic eddy, adrift. From this position her face remained obscured from view, but I caught rhythmic glimpses of self-consciously twee ballet flats hanging loosely from her curled toes.

 

The half-abandoned library still retained some of its former grandeur.  Most of the old volumes remained, with a few recent additions interspersed throughout, scattered haphazardly by the newer residents. A few loose pages fluttered in the whorls of air churned by the groaning fans, revealing crude sketches and ribald couplets. The vast room occupied the entire top floor of the townhome and had developed a thick patina of stemware that no one could be bothered to bring downstairs. Sun from the windows in the gabled ceiling glanced off the dust hanging in the stale air.

 

I had slouched forward in my seat, unconsciously summoned by the sincerity of her voice. Sara absently spun a bishop in eccentric circles on the chess table in front of her.

 

A full two beats had passed and I still had no idea how to respond to her comment.

 

She broke before I did. “Cthulu came for some of us, Azathoth, others.”

 

I almost chortled and half-choked trying to suppress my laughter into a cough. I had heard the stories, of course, campfire tales of the _Great Old Ones_ , at once terrible and incomprehensible, the things that went bump in the night.

 

The deep, sultry burgundy of her lips writhed in condescending bemusement, unable to settle on an adequately sardonic expression. She spoke in an overly-patient, measured cadence, like a harried schoolmarm who has repeated herself for the last time and has lost confidence in pupils whom she suspects will never really quite catch on. “You’re the stranger here, _cariño_. We’re all through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole. We weren’t even quite sure what to do about you when you showed up here.”

 

My immediate reaction was that she had mixed two separate entrances to disconnected ends of Wonderland. Then I realized that she was serious.

 

*****

 

Syrupy jazz melted from the door of the bar. Aging hepcats a generation too old to have been seduced by the youthful promise of Madrid milled in the doorway, like flies circling at dusk. It was long after midnight, but time had blurred in the amber streetlamps, dilating further with each passing drink. It is a peculiar cruelty of the human condition, or perhaps of just mine, that whenever things beyond our capacity or desire for comprehension transpire, time, in its infinite cruelty, ceases its otherwise persistent rhythm, stalls, and forces our rapt contemplation.

 

I think she ordered me a coupe of _rosat_ just to mock me for being a child about the whole thing. I suppose it really wasn’t all that unbearably maudlin in its presentation or juicy in its finish, but watching the condensation refract garnet light in dancing specks across my hands, it felt like a concerted affront to whatever aloof masculinity that I believed myself to have retained of the course of the last six hours. This indignity was, of course, only exacerbated by the fact that she ordered pilsners for my uncle and herself and made an elaborate ritual of explaining how _la cerveza_ was much too _fuerte_ for me before maternally insisting that I would have yet another of the same, _gracias_.

 

We slumped in mismatched matchstick wooden chairs halfway too far into the alley to be considered genuinely affiliated with the bar, but a surly waiter stood vigil with folded arms to ensure the territorial integrity of his geographically small, but evidently resource-rich fiefdom. Sara and my uncle leaned generally inward toward each other, convening an improvised court-martial or tribunal-inquisitorial to address definitively my recent transgressions and determine the appropriate course of action. A conspiratorial glance arced between them, a spontaneous discharge from the vast reservoir of unresolved tension in our triangle.

 

The center could not hold; mere anarchy would soon be loosed upon the world, yet I labored to avoid forcing the moment to crisis. Thankfully, years of obtuse parenting and suburban passive-aggression had honed my dexterous circumlocution enough to avoid the conversational event horizon that would draw me, inexorably, into the empty.

 

It was, of course, Sara, who first violated the terms of the unspoken pact. “ _Pues_ , is it truly so unexpected?” In some abstract, literal sense she was right: it was moderately arrogant to imagine that humans, particularly the aggressively transpubescent among us, had managed to gain a lossless view of _everything_ , complete in scope and free from any noise in the signal. Still, it remained a relatively significant leap from accepting that all in the world might not be as it seems to discussing multidimensional intersections and _fucking_ _Cthulhu._

 

Sure, I had read the obligatory Lovecraft during my ill-advised and risibly earnest goth phase, but that was like required reading for social misfits who thought that they were too profound for _The Bell Jar_ or _The Catcher in the Rye_ but didn’t have the patience for Pynchon. At no point did I imagine that anyone would endorse any of that pulp fiction hackery as a their very own _Hitchhiker’s Guide_ to inter-dimensional travel. If we’re being honest with ourselves, dude couldn’t even really write that well; he was just a ghoulish consumptive who feared the sun and probably spent an uncomfortable amount of time in cemeteries forcibly rhyming “strife” and “life” before he realized that other Orientalists who had never left the country had the same fetish for the cultishly exotic and esoterically eccentric that he did.

 

Sara continued. “ _Bueno_ , not all of it was correct. He couldn’t see after all; he just lifted stories off of those who could. You understand.” I stared down, despondent, into that shallow puddle of unreachable wine that always hides in the deepest corner of that frustratingly inaccessible recess just above the stem; I was considerably more inebriated than I would have desired under the circumstances. My uncle flipped a cigarette end-over-end across his knuckles, tilting the filter toward me with a twitch of his right wrist. I pinched it between thumb and index finger, dropping it into the corner of my mouth, where it caught on a patch of moisture hidden in a crevice on my chapped lips. I drew in as the paper began sustain its combustion; the dry, acrid heat found cold, anxious corners and settled there, swirling and expanding in loose, ragged eddies.

 

I forced the smoke through my fissured lips and watched the descending ember eat its way toward my fingers, monomaniacal in its orientation. A question caught in my teeth, squirming and half-formed. I coughed. It rapidly devolved into a chuckle. I collected myself. “So, what, you’re like the _Justice League_ or something? Defending the sheeple from the forces of cosmic evil? Do you all have lycra bodysuits and codenames or something?” My uncle laughed into his _Estrella Damm,_ a gossamer burst of foam disintegrating as it leapt outward. Sara rolled her eyes. Crude adolescent sarcasm evidently did not impress her.

 

" _Claro que no_." It was an impenetrable, humorless response, definitive and caustic. I scrambled to recover lost ground after the awkward miscalculation of mocking something that she evidently considered significantly more serious and somber than I had anticipated.  

 

“Fine. Then what?”

 

*****

 

It was a terrible train, even by the relatively lax post-Franco standards applied to most public infrastructure. Again, I found myself facing Sara and my uncle, this time across a thin faux-wood table bolted to the floor between us. The seats had likely once borne padding, but years of neglect had rendered them unforgiving above the jostling of the aging, uneven tracks and loose, rotting crossties. I looked past Guillem through the window onto the chalky, bleached soil of the _costa brava_. The sun had fallen behind the hills to my left and the water over Guim’s shoulder glowed with diffuse lavender sunset as if illuminated from deep below. I could almost feel the retained heat radiating from the dense limestone cliffs, still throbbing and pulsing with hours of itching rage.

 

I still didn’t accept it then, but Sara and the others were chary of giving me run of the house while they were away. I had tried to point out that, if, in fact, they were right about everything, chances were better than not that none of them would ever return home, in which case it didn’t much matter what mischief I conjured up in the interim, but this grim calculus, however rational, proved unpersuasive.

 

Even so, it had not been made at all clear to me where we were going or why. We had departed from _Estació de França_ about half an hour earlier and the train had already begun to decelerate in earnest, the rhythmic ticking of gaps in the line breathing deeper pauses between the jarring clacks of bolted rail segments. Guim grabbed a bag from the bare metal rack above his head and flicked an indifferent nod in my direction, indicating that I should shove over and stop blocking his egress. While the train ground its way deliberately into the station, I caught _Mataró_ stenciled in whitewash onto a rough brick wall, now flaking in thick, pale chips and fading from view. Sara threw the flash of a coquettish, knowing wink over her right shoulder and down the narrow aisle; I demurred, shoe-gazing in anxious, reflexive incomprehension.

 

We picked our away across the smooth paving stones in the uncertain mix of vanishing sunlight and ancient streetlamps, gliding wordlessly though the warren of cramped alleys toward the sea. Sara was in front now, her improbable heels gnashing like cruel fangs from the bag slung low across her back. Guim and my uncle followed closely, sending probative, suspicious stares into the thick, encroaching darkness that welled up from dormant buildings, pouring outward and reclaiming its territory from day. Immediately behind me, bounding forward with a pace that I felt was intended to shepherd me forward and discourage flight, strode Neus, the pallid, preternaturally tranquil _catalana_ and Pía, a tall _chilena_ who wore her coal-black hair in a rude, choppy Chelsea.

 

Pía whistled brightly, the note abruptly tumbling a step down the treble clef as Sara rolled her hips to face the sound, her gait uninterrupted. Walking backward, Sara arched her long, slender neck and smiled toward the sea over her shoulder. The white sand beach was narrow with the high tide; a crag of stone rode high in the water, offering a hint of the expansive shallow shelf that supported its base and extended out indefinitely beneath the surface.

 

Sara dropped her bag into the fine, soft sand, flexing her toes deliberately against the forgiving medium. After a moment she permitted herself to fall backward, flinging her wrists above her head, where they crashed into the sand, burying themselves like meteors at the bottom of fresh craters. The other four milled about, kicking impassively at uneven mounds of sand or balancing clumsily along the line cut by the cresting waves. Neus, almost as young as I was, let slip a genuine laugh whenever a crest caught her off guard and startled her with a frigid reminder of its presence. It wasn’t a reflexive, childish giggle in response to the cold water, but an unguarded, raucous chortle that welled up, uncontrollably from some resonant hollow within her.

 

I sat close to Sara, slightly farther from the water’s edge on her left side, with my heels bracing into the beac. My eyes caught the few shards of sunset still skittering across the wrinkled surface of the water. I rolled my wrist and absently skipped a fistful of crumbling clumps across into Sara’s periphery. Her neck adjusted and she hummed tersely in curt recognition, like a parent woken by a petulant child.

 

Before I could elaborate, she raised her left arm limply, letting her final two fingers curl back in toward the palm. “ _Tranquilo_ , _cariño,_ ” she intoned, deep and distant.

 

Silence reigned between us for nearly two hours. The moon had begun to rise, hanging low among the stars and casting a long, rippling reflection as we stared vaguely in the direction of _Menorca_. The blue-grey crescent seemed to catch on the horizon, hooked by its narrow, curling tip.

 

Neus returned, her pale skin brilliant, almost iridescent in the dispersed light of the hidden sun. Sara smiled again and reached into her bag. Delicately, she drew out a small, stone figure, a mass of tentacles perched on stout legs with vestigial wings raked behind it.

 

Pía spoke from behind us, “ _ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”_

 

It took me another moment to realize that she was serious, rather than testing the limits of my youthful, American credulity. As it occurred to me that they were entirely earnest about whatever ritual had begun to unfold, I watched Sara and my uncle build a small mound in the sand, heaping loose grains into the highest pile that physics would permit, patting the summit flat and smoothing it carefully with damp palms and etching filigree across the entire face of the truncated cone. When Sara and my uncle finally stepped back to assess their completed project, it still only rose to Pía’s waist. Even so, they kneeled again and crawled gingerly forward. My uncle suppressed his breathing to a shallow, nearly imperceptible hiss as Sara, crouching, placed the figure on at the center of the raised platform. It sank in among the loose grains, depressing the surface slightly and listing languidly to the left before staggering to a halt after half an inch of downward progress.

 

I must have looked like that fucking gramophone dog; my head had fallen almost to my right shoulder in skeptical disbelief. Few things in this world are more unsettling than watching everyone in your immediate vicinity bend at the waist and plant their foreheads on the beach in reverence to a polished soapstone idol no more than a foot and a half tall. Each hummed along in uninterrupted unison, their cantillation rising and falling together like the chest of an enormous, sleeping mammal with each glottal stop. After a few iterations, Pía began to slap the sand, beating out a furious undercurrent to their ravening, desperate incantation; the rest followed, matching Pía’s eccentric, erratic tempo effortlessly.

 

I reached forward and tapped Neus on her shoulder. She had sat next to Sara, directly between me and the surf. The expression she wore at the interruption almost caused me to flee in fear. I was paralyzed. The complete, unmitigated rage reflected in Neus left me unable to react. I recalled all too vividly those panicked dreams from childhood, where no matter the severity of the threat or imminence of the crisis, neither gaping mouths nor twitching legs will adequately respond.

 

Before I could regain control of my extremities and scurry, sheepishly back toward the sleeping town, the earth began to tremble beneath me. No one else seemed perturbed. Instead, they redoubled their efforts, smacking their hands raw against the sand in an inhuman tempo, awful and tremendous. The tremors grew, throwing visible waves through the sand and tossing walls of spray several feet into the air. Then everything stopped. The group lay perfectly still, faces pressed into the sand piled on cracking rock, hands clasped together before them. My heart throbbed in my ears once before being drowned out by the earth falling away. Far out in in the shallow bight, the monolithic island collapsed, drawn down into a cavernous maw. The gaping empty spread outward, tremendous sheets of water and stone falling into nothing, forever lost.

 

A bottomless, unearthly howl bellowed from the pit, followed immediately by uncountable tentacles, writhing in the sea and churning it white with foam. The bulbous, elongated head breached the cusp of the vortex, revealing tremendous obsidian eyes. The mouth let fly an unimaginable shriek as vast, gnarled claws clasped at the dangling crescent moon. The sound reverberated in my skull and the world glowed white before everything went black.

 

\-- End --


End file.
